speech impediments

ah yeah,
good evening to you all. Japan-wise i have no real updates except ive now been trained to teach kids and had another food disaster when i ordered what appeared to be a pork stirfry but was in fact an offal stirfry. Delicious. But the real reason im posting is to post my response to an 'assignment' adrian gave me. I emailed him and told him to tell me something to write about because i was bored. This is what he came up with:

i order you to write about people with speech impediments and how they have been treated by society throughout the ages. Discuss with reference to specific examples. Bonus marks will be awarded for incorporating rape (not really)

So, here is my official lecture on speech impediments. And no, there's nothing to do with rape in it.

Children have it hard. Adolescent peer groups are probably the most judging, critical and unforgiving social groups you will ever be part of in your life. The slightest sign of abnormality leads the groups to behave like savages, teasing, ridiculing and outcasting the unfortunate kid until they either become a loner or commit suicide. One of the most ill-fated abnormalities a child can have is a speech impediment. Being able to communicate is one of most primal necessities for kids to be able to the become part of a peer group. Not only does a speech impediment make it difficult for a child to interact with others, it renders their attempts to communicate hilarious. Now, I’m not saying that stuttering, lisping, stammering, mispronunciation of words, slurring and mutism is hilarious, but you have to admit it borders on humorous.

Take Alistair Duff-Forbes for instance. He was a class mate of mine back in primary school. He had a shocking stutter. He also used to wet himself daily. He also used to throw his cricket hat in the air to himself and commentate himself taking AFL ‘marks.’
Now I admit my peers and I may have shared the occasion laugh at his expense. I mean, a pants-wetting, schoolyard commentating, stuttering kid is pretty amusing, even though we only admit this behind close doors and in the company of an able-bladdered, not insane friend with perfect diction. In poor Alistair’s case, his stutter was a mere byproduct to his other unfortunate habits. As if he wasn’t ostracized enough by the impromptu urinations and autistic commentary but he stuttered as well!

But Mr Duff-Forbes maybe didn’t have the worst of it as a child. There was a kid in my primary school named Tim Grigg, who seemed normal enough. He was relatively normal except he couldn’t pronounce his own name! He said his r’s as w’s so ‘Grigg,’ became ‘Gwigg.’ The poor kid copped such a bollacking for not being able to say his own name that he never got the chance to prove himself as a normal person. Just from that simple mispronunciation his chances of having a stable and normal schooling were destroyed. Kids can be so cruel.

But its not just kids that suffer from speech impediments and the ensuing ridiculing, adults too can be derided and mocked for their condition. Take ‘Mark’ for example. Mark was a student at Charles Sturt University who suffered from ‘mutism,’ which is “the condition of being unable or unwilling to speak.” Mark was a classic example of a mute. People that lived in dorms with him hadn’t heard him speak in a whole year of living with him. He walked everywhere dressed in black, staring at his shoes, not saying a word, even to his dormies who inevitably took advantage of his mutism and spent hours yelling questions at him. Even under the most extreme pressure Mark remained mute. Courts, a well-known, larger than life, (literally and figuratively) university personality once bared her rather inelegant breasts to Mark to absolutely no response, except a shuffle away to his room to presumably knock one off over the only set of real tits he would ever see in his life.

One of the most surprising things about Mark was that he inexplicably chose to live in a dormitory. As you can imagine, dorms are extremely social and socializing is definitely not one of a mute’s strong points. He obviously didn’t choose to live in dorm for its friendly conversation and surely didn’t expect to move into a dorm with a clique of like-minded no-speakers, so I suspect his motivations were rather more sinister. If there was anyone I have met in my life who was most likely to be a murderer or suicide bomber it would be he.

Famous people too can be beset by speech impediments. When I was doing some research for this lecture – and it is an lecture (thanks Gervais) – I found a list of famous people with speech impediments. There were a few surprises; apparently Winston Churchill, Bruce Willis and Tiger Woods all have stutters. But the most surprising name in this list was Scatman John. Now, was the author of the website confused when he heard one of Mr John’s hits, or does he really have a stutter? Could the author have misinterpreted the early 90’s classic Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop) as a man with a horrible speech impediment? Or was it the follow up smash, Scatman’s World that convinced the author of John’s problem? Funnily enough after looking into the Scatman’s career (I have no life) I discovered he did indeed have a stutter and furthermore was “the recipient of the Annie Glenn Award for his outstanding service to the stuttering community, and was also inducted to the National Stuttering Association's Hall of Fame.” I can only imagine the presentation night for this award. Since when was there a “stuttering community,” anyway? Not really attempting to assimilate into mainstream society are they? If anything, by segregating themselves into their ‘society’ they are making things worse from themselves. Do they walk around with ‘National Stuttering Association’ (NSA) T-shirts? I would imagine that stutterers would prefer to keep a low profile and not broadcast their impediment by having a “Stuttering Association Hall of Fame” and proudly wearing their problem on their T-shirts. What kind of masochists are they? Maybe they thrive on the attention, prosper on peoples ears listening to their every word, waiting for evidence that they indeed stutter.
“So, wh…wha…what are you doing tonight?”
“HA! You’re a stutterer! I knew it.”
“Guilty.”

So there you have it, a comprehensive look at speech impediments throughout the ages. Whether you stutter, stammer, lisp, mispronunciate words, slur or are a mute chances are you have spent your life living in isolation and communicating to the outside world only by a crude morse code. Unless you have no hands, which is a whole new lecture in itself.